Hungarian Parliament Building

This guide to the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest follows architect Imre Steindl, who beat eighteen rivals in an 1880 competition and spent two decades watching his neo-Gothic design rise on the Danube. It traces the dome he built into the skyline as a nod to Hungary's founding year, and the thousand laborers who raised the building starting in 1885. Inside, workers applied roughly forty kilograms of gold leaf across the palace's six hundred and ninety one rooms.